A record 64,000 El Paso County voters turned in ballots on election day, according to the county’s clerk and recorder, Chuck Broerman.

Officials were expecting about 40,000 Election Day ballots, Broerman said, but ultimately received more than they did on any Election Day in history – including last year, which featured a highly anticipated presidential contest and a high-profile Senate race.

It’s difficult to say why so many voters waited until Election Day to vote, but Broerman said it could have been because voters needed added time to navigate a ballot that included some complex issues.

“I think voters were doing their due diligence,” he said. “That they took the extra time to educate themselves and make a good and informed decision.”

He said about 34,000 ballots were not yet tallied when election judges stopped counting Tuesday night, a number he said was caused by the Election Day influx. The number of ballots still to be counted the day after the election was “unremarkable” and similar to recent years, he said.

Further tally updates would come Wednesday evening and Thursday, he said.

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Despite Tuesday’s surge, overall turnout appeared to remain low. As of 6:30 p.m. Wednesday night, El Paso County’s turnout stood at just over 32%, according to the secretary of state, a lower rate than in either the 2017 or 2019 elections.

The tens of thousands of still-to-be counted ballots were not the result of an election night snafu that caused an hour and a half delay in reporting initial returns, Broerman said.

Officials with El Paso County and the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said an error in the state’s software caused the number of ballots to be incorrectly added up, resulting in a discrepancy between the data that was set to be sent to the state and the results tracked by the county. County officials noticed the incorrect data that the state’s software came up with and stopped the process before the faulty number was made public. County and state officials say the data released publicly has been corrected.

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“It’s unfortunate that that occurred,” Broerman said. “We work hard to underscore and amplify confidence citizens should have in our election system.”

The county’s election management process is conducted in a secure room with no internet connection, Broerman said. The election results for each race are tallied and downloaded onto an encrypted thumb drive, which is taken out of the room and plugged into a computer that is used to upload results to the state’s Election Night Reporting system, a central hub for every county in the state to post results.

But before officials clicked submit, Broerman said, they noticed that the number of ballots recorded by the state system was about 25,000 more than the county had recorded on a printout of results from its tabulation room.

County officials then deleted from their website a scanned copy of their printout and reached out to the Secretary of State’s Office shortly after 7:30 p.m., Broerman said.

Annie Orloff, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s Office, called the snafu a “minor issue.” She said county officials worked with the secretary of state’s team to manually adjust the counting error and later publish the correct numbers. State officials worked with their software vendor to resolve the issue, she said.

“We have safeguards in place to make sure we are accurate and fair,” Broerman said.

A section of the website set aside for periodic vote count updates Tuesday night was replaced by a statement from Broerman about the delay.

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For the rest of the night, results were posted to the state’s central hub, the source of the initial error, which had been fixed. The El Paso County elections website linked to those results instead of providing updates. “We did not want to have a discrepancy,” Broerman told The Gazette. “We did not want to have two competing systems that caused concerns.”

Broerman said results recorded by the county are the results “of record,” and the state’s website is intended to be a convenience for the public and the press. In a statement released in the days before the election, the Secretary of State’s Office said, “Counties may post results to their websites but are not required to do so.”

Officials at both levels of government used the opportunity to ensure voters that the system worked and is secure.

“We have enjoyed a great partnership with the Secretary of State’s Office,” Broerman said. “We want to continue to have that great relationship. It takes a team to do what we do.”

Results will not be made official until the county has received ballots from citizens who are overseas, given voters a chance to “cure” ballots that have signature verification issues and conducted an audit of the results.

Broerman expects a small release of results tomorrow.